Principal Engineer, Stream Governance & Metadata

IBM; Armonk (NY); On-site; USD 190,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software seeks a Principal Engineer to shape governance, metadata, and schema technology powering Confluent's data streaming platform. You will lead architecture decisions and collaborate with product and engineering teams across IBM's cloud-native stack.

You will design scalable, multi-tenant infrastructure, mentor engineers, contribute to open-source projects, and communicate complex concepts to executives. A Master's degree is preferred.

Qualifications

• Proven track record leading architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems.
• Knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability, and cloud-native platforms.
• Depth in streaming/event-driven architectures; familiarity with schema management, data catalogs, and governance.
• Navigate ambiguity, reduce complexity, anticipate trends for 3–5 years.
• Influence executives and stakeholders; foster collaboration across teams.
• Turn vision into delivered implementations with bias to shipped outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive company-level technical strategy for critical governance systems, ensuring long-term innovation for schema and metadata infrastructure.
• Architect and evolve high-performance metadata management systems that support low-latency lookups and strong consistency.
• Design and evolve data protection capabilities — including encryption and access control — across the platform.
• Build and maintain highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure for governance services.
• Establish and evangelize engineering standards, architectural patterns, and technical frameworks.
• Partner with executives, product management, and engineering leaders to align technical vision with business objectives.
• Mentor senior and staff engineers, growing future technical leaders.
• Contribute to open-source projects and represent Confluent externally.

Skills

Technical Strategy

Distributed Systems

Streaming Architecture

Strategic Influence

Leadership Presence

Execution

AWS

Azure

GCP

Education

Master's Degree

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

IBM Software seeks a Principal Engineer to shape governance, metadata, and schema technology powering Confluent's data streaming platform. You will lead architecture decisions and collaborate with product and engineering teams across IBM's cloud-native stack.

You will design scalable, multi-tenant infrastructure, mentor engineers, contribute to open-source projects, and communicate complex concepts to executives. A Master's degree is preferred.